Because of the attention, quite a few people dropped me a note via this website, and said some quite interesting things in the process. They contacted me privately so I won’t reveal who they are or what they said, but I wanted to honour their intent. I firmly believe the greater the dialogue between the people who write books and the people who “pirate” them, the better.

But there’s one exception to that policy of keeping all the comments private. It was perhaps the most significant and controversial message I received. It was from someone who claimed to be the “owner of Mobilism”, the site where I’d first encountered all this piratical activity. The email address was “admin@mobilism.org” and he asked me to keep any “correspondence” private. So I won’t publish what he sent to me. That’s a way of acknowledging his ownership of his words – see what I’m doing here?

I am, though, going to reproduce what I said in reply:

Hi – many thanks for that, very interesting, and you’re right, I should have emphasised that an author can ask for a title to be taken down. But then that begs the rather obvious question: why should they?

Under law, I own my content. I have licensed it to certain individuals and companies to be used in certain ways which I give permission to. The fact that I am now having a conversation with an anonymous person who has essentially (though indirectly) taken it upon themselves to change the economic basis on which I sell my goods is wrong, unworkable and will in the end lead to people like me doing something else with my time. I do believe that.

This, for me, is the essence of the matter. If I own something, I should be the one making the decisions on how it is exploited. By providing Mobilism, you have taken a good deal of power out of my hands. The decision not to provide the book for free, or very cheaply, may indeed be the wrong one – but it is mine to make, not yours, and not the users of your site.

I am using strong words to make myself clear, because I want you to understand how your activities make people like me feel: we feel emasculated. We feel we have created something that we want to distribute, and we want to make our own mistakes. We don’t want to be lectured on marketing by people we have never met, nor ever will. We don’t want to be told we “don’t get it” – you are not saying this, I know, but some people responding to my article have said that. I do indeed “get it.” I have a better understanding of the economics of content than 99.9% of the users of Mobilism. I know what I am doing. And if I screw up, it will be my mistake.

I thank you for responding to me, and if you wish to keep this conversation private I will honour that wish. But I would say this runs very much counter to the principles you and Mobilism seek to profess, and I would like to put the exchange on my blog and keep this out in the open. But I will allow you to make the call on that – a courtesy which, I would point out, your site did not extend to me in the first instance.

Thanks for dropping me a line.

As you’ll see, I said I would allow him to make the call on publishing the email, but he never replied. So here we are. My response was rantier than I would have liked, but it was also heartfelt; whatever the rights and wrongs of the strategy behind free content and free promotion and pirated material, at the end of the day it should be the people who create the content who make the call on its distribution. I respect and support Cory Doctorow’s right to distribute his books for free, and I know why he does it. I’d expect him (as I’m sure he does) to respect my right not to do so, and to allow me to be wrong if that turns out to be the case.

Comments

Yes, yes and yes. Our words, our books, our music, our illustrations, our photographs etc are our intellectual property and our daily employment, and thus, surely, it is up to us to decide how to send them out into the world and to make the decision as to whether we should be paid for doing so. And if the world has decided that we don’t ‘get’ it, then the hell with it. we’ll eventually get so hacked off being told essentially that ‘property is theft’ and that we just don’t ‘get’ that we shouldn’t be paid for doing our jobs that we’ll no longer broadcast our work. We’ll keep it to ourselves. We will not exhibit, publish, broadcast, blog, tweet or anything. We’ll keep on creating, but we’ll just do it for the love of it, like we have always done.

Then what are the pirates going to do? Make it up for themselves? I think not.

Great article. Your measured response to the anonymous face of Mobilism does you great credit. You rock, Mr Shepherd.

Captain Blythe,
Your recent engagement with pirates showed great eloquence and control. Johnny Adams would have been proud. Unfortunately pirates are by definition greedy low lifes who don’t understand logic and reason. The only way to beat pirates is a bigger and better arsenal. i.e. better DRM technology standards. The publishing industry needs to be far more aggressive in working together to address the issue. The law will always be more than a few steps behind. Look how long it has taken to catch Kim Megaupload – and he wasn’t exactly hard to find for the last 7 years! This world has changed, but the publishing industry only has half the solution in place.
Keep at it rockstar, pirate chaser! it is more entertaining than most the content served up over here.
C

Not sure I agree that the problem is DRM – Apple’s making iTunes work without DRM, Amazon’s doing the same with MP3 downloads. DRM will always be crackable, and just ends up annoying your customers – it’s deeply annoying to me that I can’t read Kindle books on other devices, for instance. Questions seems to me to be more what we’re going to do to thrive and survive in a world of piracy and copying? And I do not have the answer – but then, does anyone?